Venus Patrol -- the website dedicated to independent videogames and their crossover with art, music and design which took in in excess of $100,000 in its successful 2011 Kickstarter campaign -- has officially opened at http://venuspatrol.com and begun offering daily news and features in search of beauty in all corners of videogame culture.

Founded and edited by Brandon Boyer, who also serves as chairman of the Independent Games Festival and is co-founder of Austin, Texas’s independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, the launch of the website includes new membership packages giving subscribers exclusive games, art and music.

Included in the packages are two Venus Patrol-exclusive games, Gun Godz,
the tongue in cheek lo-fi hip-hop first-person-shooter from Vlambeer, creators of Super Crate Box (with a guest appearance by underground hip-hop legend Dose One), and Capsule, an ultra-atmospheric space survival horror from Canabalt creator AdamAtomic.

Venus Patrol is the sequel to Offworld, the game culture site Brandon helmed here at Boing Boing in 2008 and 2009.

I ran a blog about videogames called Offworld for Boing Boing from winter 2008 through autumn 2009, and doing so changed my life forever. It wasn't the first time I'd written about videogames 'professionally', but it was the first time that doing so started to make me feel like part of a bigger and entirely amazing community. A community of artists, musicians, designers, coders, nearly all of whom had taken the terrifying risk of jumping out of the rat race and trying to live life on their own terms: by creating things they know only they can create and trying to find an appreciative audience who might support them.

The pledge swag is amazing: $1 gets you an exclusive wallpaper from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi and Minecraft skins by Emmy award-winner Pendleton Ward; $25 gets you three indie games released exclusively for the project; $75 gets you Moon Grotto 7", a vinyl EP featuring "hidden" music & remixes from SWORD & SWORCERY EP composed by Scientific American; $200 gets a set of prints of 8-bit era artwork by Double Fine's Scott C.; and more.

Plans extend beyond writing, too: "Venus Patrol is just the first volley in a much longer game: the roots, foundation, and interstellar pirate radio station on top of which a number of other in-progress projects that branch out of the web will be built," says Boyer.